Newbie here. So our annual family beach trip to Oak Island, NC is coming up and I was considering on bringing out my radio to TX from the deck of the beach house. Planning on bringing an Arrow J-pole and my mobile Yaesu FTM-400xdr because they’re easy to set up. Repeaters are pretty quiet here near Charlotte and I’m wondering if I will get crickets on 2M/70cm even though I would think that propagation at the beach would be good since it’s so flat. Also, I noticed that there is an ARRL >50 MHz QSO contest for the first 2 days of vacation. I’m not a contester but may make an exception.

I have an Icom 7300 but I don’t feel like hauling a larger antenna and the rig down to the beach.

Maybe it’s a dumb question because no one can predict how busy the air will be but wondered if anyone has made a similar decision.

I'd take both...

This is what they make the IC-705 for. Couple it with a small telescoping pole (crappie pole, Sotabeams, etc.) and you'll be on HF and VHF with minimal setup and hassle.

As long as the family doesn't mind you playing radio on vacation I'd say go for it!

Ha. Within the last few months, I’ve already ponied up $2-$3k for a new 7300 / FTM-400 / FT3DR ham shack and I’m (potentially) spending another $300 for a battery and j-pole for the beach so my wife may not take kindly if I tell her I need a 4th radio.

Taking the radio is more about curiosity of making contacts there, beach propagation, and finding a way to spend down time if it’s raining, getting out of the sun, etc. My kids are at the age where they don’t care what I do, as they do their own thing.

I'd suggest keeping an eye on the propagation data for a week or so before you go.  Keep track of what's happening on the bands, especially VHF.  QRZ has a little widget on their main page that shows at a quick glance what's going on.  It's rather small but if you hold your mouse cursor over the widget it will enlarge.  You can also click it to go to the author's web page and there is a button at the top labeled [Glossary] that is helpful.  The data is updated regularly during the day.

Take note of the MUF.  That's the "Maximum Usable Frequency" in mHz and anything higher than that is just going to head out into space.  Right this minute the HF MUF is 16.08 mHz in Boulder, CO so 17 mHz and up is probably pretty dead.

Most of the HF bands above 20 meters have been showing "Poor" for the past month or two.  20 meters and below has been "Fair" most of the time with an occasional "Good" on 40-80 at night.  Since I don't use VHF or UHF I don't really understand that information but if you figure it out and track it for a week or so you should be able to get an idea of whether it's worth taking that gear with you or not.

Take those propagation reports with a grain of salt. I've made a ton of good DX contacts on "poor" propagation days. Most notably a 20m SSB contact to New Zealand from my car with 20 watts from a 3ft hamstick at 9pm, in the winter, in 2019 (not a good propagation year)

Thanks! I didn’t know that about MUF!

As the Scout said above, I’ve made contacts on 10/20  when it has a Fair or Poor rating. I dunno...

I'd bring the 7300 and a simple antenna like an end fed or some type of portably vertical.

Tropo happens alot in coastal areas over water, you might get lucky.

Site for checking that:

https://www.dxinfocentre.com/tropo.html

My folks used to have a house at Cherry Grove Beach, SC, about 25 miles southwest of Long Beach (Oak Island).

With a little luck you'll have some 2 Meter Tropo propagation. Using just an HT with a 1/4 wave whip, I've worked stations from New England to Florida from the deck of their house when it fires up.

As for HF, make a 20 Meter Inverted V dipole and try to point it so the lobes point approximately NE/SW for Europe and E/W for Northern Africa. If 15 is open, trim the antenna for 21 MHz.

While you're down there, run down to Calabash and/or Little River for some seafood.

ETA: The deck on the house was ~30' long, so a 20 Meter Inverted V fit nicely. For the center support, four 5' lengths of  3/4" Pvc tubing and three couplings were used for the center support. It was lashed to the deck railing.

I’d bring the 7300 and leave the VHF/UHF

vhf/uhf repeater hams can be a click’ish bunch and HF is always more fun

When Tropo opens up, the rudeness usually goes away PDQ.

Repeaters are often so busy, they'll start a roundtable, kind of like working an HF net..

I will definitely do HF next year. Just don't have time to build an HF antenna before the trip.

Always good to go south for some seafood. I once won a crab leg eating contest. Lol

Take the 7300 and put up a 6m dipole. It would only be 3 meters long.  Based on time of year and your location you could work a bunch of DX  using FT8.


8nBAIT

As long as you go in with the right mindset, no you won't. But I wouldn't necessarily bank on making contacts either. That being said, when 2m opens up far it is pretty impressive what it can do. Especially if you have the ability to do 2 SSB. There's a group of guys around here who talk with another group of guys pretty often via 2m SSB and it's about 200 ish miles between them.

If you have the coax, the antenna would only take a couple of hours, if that long, to make. Get a 25' roll of 18 or 20 gauge speaker cable and peel the 2 wires apart for the elements. Use any non-conductor as insulators, handles from a toothbrush, plastic from a CD case, even wood from an old broom of mop handle would work. Since it would be an inverted Vee, the stress on the elements and insulators would be minimal.

Each element will be ~18' long for 20 meters. Be sure to leave an extra foot or two for adjustment. Fold each element back on itself back on it self at about 11' from the center insulator for 15 Meters. The longest time for the center mast would be the trip back and forth from Lowes or Home Depot for the PVC pipe. Any kind of heavy twine can be used to secure the ends of the antenna.

When I'd set my station up at my folks beach house, I'd used a Heathkit HW-8 qrp CW rig. This was over 35 years ago and the logbook has long since disappeared (divorce), but I remember working some European DX and a bunches and bunches of stateside stations. The antenna was on the 2^nd floor deck and the rig was on a picnic table directly beneath it on the ground floor deck. Copious quantities of 807s may or may not have been consumed during operations.

My family got a condo in FL one summer.  I took my HF rig and strung a dipole on the balcony.   I worked Russia and other European countries from there.  My family probably thought I was wierd but hey, I had fun.  And the antenna...it was from one corner of the ceiling to the floor other side.  It was bad.. but it worked.

Nice!

Last year I ran the weekly Olivia net from a condo in Nags Head. I used an endfed from the balcony across an adjacent vacant lot. It was up the whole week we were there.

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I love the experience working HF from the beach, I would recommend a good headset if you're down on the water due to a lot of possible wind noise. A free standing vertical GP can be an easy setup if you have the parts for it. This was from lake Erie a few weeks ago.

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very cool



DAMN,....I need a vacation.

.

Nice. HF will be my goal next year for sure.

Nope, no HF on the beach for me...I go on vacation and try to avoid technology. I like to drink booze, eat seafood and look at hot chicks in bikinis.

I did take my OpenSpot and DMR HT for the road. I used them on the drive down and back with great success. Unlike repeaters there was no problem finding someone to chat with while my wife unit slept.

Mobile HF > FM.

Yep.

If I were going somewhere that FM was still kicking I might feel different. But yeah I dunno if that exists anywhere. There's always someone on HF.

Same with the digitals.

Beach HF is fun.

I use a vertical mounted on a big aluminum stake and stick the stack into the damp salt water sand and it is a perfect ground plane, no radials needed.

I sit there on battery power with a 20 watt HF radio and make phone contacts into eastern EU.

While on the subject of portable antennas, here's a super simple one, made entirely from zip cord, including the feed line. LINK
The catch is that the feedline has to be tuned, so it's a monoband antenna.